(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a dialog supporting apparatus which supports an on-going dialog between people.
(2) Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a translation device has been developed with a purpose of supporting an on-going dialog in different languages, respectively, spoken by travelers and local people at travel destinations abroad or the like. A representative example is a translation apparatus which is obtained by providing a translation scheme based on text and translation of example sentences and example usages, on a small information processing apparatus such as a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). Such an apparatus is provided with thousands of example usages in order to cover general travel conversation, and requires a user to select a desired example usage by viewing the list of example usages. Hence, the apparatus has a usability problem when it comes to actual use. Especially in the case where the apparatus has a small display for displaying a list of example usages and thus the number of example usages which can be viewed at one time is small, this problem is more noticeable. In addition, assuming a general use status of a translation apparatus, example usages corresponding to several sentences must be used in the dialog with the other party in a great many cases. Thus, it takes more time than expected to complete an on-going dialog by means of a translation apparatus. Therefore, in order to achieve a final purpose of supporting an on-going dialog made between people, there is a need to add a supplementary function for enabling a user to immediately select a desired example usage from among the list of large number of example usages.
As a method for solving this problem, there has been provided an approach for narrowing down candidate next utterances of a user using example dialog models or conversation training history corpuses (for example, refer to Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 2003-30187).